Monday, June 22, 2026

Guest Opinion | Michelle Matthews: Trees Are Not the Problem

Across eleven Pasadena Unified campuses, 193 mature trees are scheduled to be cut down as part of the soil remediation that followed the Eaton fire. The district began the removals on June 11, and 16 trees have already been lost. I write as a parent whose son has attended four of these schools, including San Rafael, Jackson, and Eliot. The more closely I have looked at this, the clearer it becomes that the trees are being treated as the problem when the problem was never the trees.

The contamination did not come from the trees. It came from a catastrophic fire whose ecological effects we will be coping with for years to come, and the lead and other contaminants in the soil were deposited by that disaster, or in some cases were already present beforehand. The contamination was not exacerbated by the mature oaks that have shaded these schoolyards for decades. Those trees are among the few things still providing much-needed shade and habitat on these campuses, most of which are urban heat islands.

It is worth being specific about what the canopy does, because the value is measurable. When Amigos de los Rios greened Jackson Elementary, an analysis by Earth Economics estimated the campus gained more than $128,000 in benefits each year, most of it from the trees holding down temperature on grounds that would otherwise bake. Tree cover around schools is linked to stronger academic performance, and the cooling, cleaner air, and lower stress it provides fall most heavily on the students with the least access to green space to begin with.

The financial cost compounds the environmental one. The district has put the project at roughly $6.6 million, a figure that covers removing the trees, excavating the soil, and the restoration that follows. The share of that spent specifically on taking the trees down is money that could instead go toward an ecological approach to remediation that keeps the canopy in place, particularly since trees are among the most effective natural soil remediators we have. The trade-off is worth weighing carefully, because this is not a loss we can reverse on any timeline that helps current students. A hundred-year-old oak took a century to grow into the shade and habitat it now provides, and no replanting can give that back within the years a child spends at a school.

The district also had the work classified as environmental remediation rather than a facilities project, a distinction that relieves it of any legal obligation to replant. The removal of the trees themselves does not appear to have been required at all. In a June 11 email, Zhilan (Kate) Zhang, a hazardous substances engineer at the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, explained that the agency had directed the removal of contaminated soil based on the data PUSD provided, but added that “DTSC did not mandate PUSD to remove trees.”

The financial cost compounds the environmental one. The district has put the project at roughly $6.6 million, a figure that covers removing the trees, excavating the soil, and the restoration that follows. The share of that spent specifically on taking the trees down is money that could instead go toward an ecological approach to remediation that keeps the canopy in place, particularly since trees are among the most effective natural soil remediators we have. The trade-off is worth weighing carefully, because this is not a loss we can reverse on any timeline that helps current students. A hundred-year-old oak took a century to grow into the shade and habitat it now provides, and no replanting can give that back within the years a child spends at a school.

Workable alternatives exist, and they are the kind a skilled arborist would identify. Nick Araya of Tree Care LA recommends bringing in vacuum trucks to excavate the top six inches of exposed soil while keeping soil crews on standby to replace it immediately. As he describes it, the method “encapsulates the contaminated soil, keeps contaminated dust from becoming airborne, and protects the roots and the trees.” None of this replaces full excavation where acute lead threatens children, but it is the reason the real question is not whether the soil is contaminated but whether every one of these trees must be destroyed in order to address it.

According to arborist Sabine Hoppner, no arborist report or tree-specific analysis has been produced or made public for this project, and a review of the district’s own removal list has turned up irregularities in the recorded trunk-diameter measurements. Some of the trees slated for removal also hold active bird nests, which California Fish and Game Code section 3503 makes it unlawful to needlessly destroy, meaning the district should be running nesting surveys rather than working to a destruction schedule.

Research funded through the TREE Fund has shown that amendments like biochar and biosolids can rehabilitate contaminated urban soil while keeping trees alive, and the USDA Forest Service has long documented the use of trees themselves to draw contaminants out of the ground. None of this replaces excavation where acute lead threatens children, but it is the reason the real question is not whether the soil is contaminated but whether each individual tree must be destroyed in order to address it.

The expertise to answer that question is close at hand. Dr. Danielle Stevenson of CAER Earth, an environmental toxicologist who has been carrying out remediation work in the area since the Eaton fire, can speak directly to the alternatives the district could weigh, approaches that address contaminated soil while keeping trees and habitat intact.

When 17-year-old Paloma Muñiz Ochoa put her body on the line for a hundred-year-old oak, she demonstrated why all of us should value these trees the way we value our own bodies. When we care for them, we are caring for ourselves. The region lost a great deal of its canopy in the Eaton fire, and what survived is worth more now than it was before. The trees are not the problem; the people and priorities driving their removal are. Student safety, health, and well-being are inseparable from the health of the environment those students grow up in, and the trees should not be the thing we sacrifice, especially after our community has already lost so much.

Michelle Matthews is a Pasadena Unified parent and Executive Director of the California Native Horticultural Foundation. She was the Executive Director of Arlington Garden in Pasadena from 2017-2024.